Digitally Drilling For Oil And Gas

Data is the lifeblood of modern Oil & Gas exploration and production (E&P). Throughout the
search to recovery of crude oil and natural gas, the upstream sector for the oil and gas
industry must manage, analyze, and store digital information from 3D and 4D seismic surveys,
downhole sensors to high resolution satellite images. To remain competitive and agile,
strategies for lowering operating costs and increasing discovery and recovery rates through data
driven exploration must address seemingly contradictory goals:

Support higher resolution capture methods and new seismic formats

Accelerate analysis of massive amounts of unstructured data

Collect and analyze metadata from field sensors

Control rising data storage costs

Actively archive data to cloud or object storage while keeping it accessible indefinitely

What this means is that Oil and Gas companies will first drill virtually in the digital domain
to determine how much to bid on a site and where to physically place a well. With billions at
stake, geoscientists apply the most sophisticated modelling and simulation technology to ensure
a high return on investment. This requires vast amounts of data and metadata analysis both from
current and historical data points. It is not uncommon for a large exploration project to
produce several petabytes of data. Scientific discovery in the digital domain pushes the
boundaries of data management and requires a solution to ensure storage demands are met.

KEY BENEFITS

Accelerate modern data-intensive seismic and E&P applications

Reduce costs by automating the flow of data across all storage

Integrate with cloud or object storage as an active archive

DATASPHERE: A METADATA ENGINE FOR DATA

DataSphere is a metadata engine designed to separate and offload the architecturally rigid
relationship between applications and where their data is stored. Offloading metadata access
with DataSphere delivers predictable, low-latency operations by guaranteeing that metadata
operations do not get “stuck” in the queue behind other data requests. Rather than having to
wait for sequential operations to complete, DataSphere can leverage parallel access with the
latest optimizations of the standard NFS v4.2 protocol. Leveraging NFS v4.2 significantly speeds
up metadata and small file operations by requiring less than half of the protocol-specific
network round trips compared to NFS v3.

Figure 1 - The DataSphere architecture separates the metadata path from the data path so that data can be abstracted from its physical location.

DataSphere Extended Services (DSX) service legacy NFS v3 and SMB environments, and can be used
in tandem with clients using the latest NFS v4.2 advancements. Regardless of client types,
DataSphere provides insight into how an application makes use of its data. With this knowledge,
DataSphere can place or move files to different storage types or tiers without disrupting an
application’s access, even while files are open and the data is in-flight. This enables IT to
ensure that applications will always meet E&P performance, price, and protection
requirements.

ACCELERATING DATA ANALYSIS AND TIME TO PRODUCTION

Success or failure to find oil and gas depends on the quantity and quality of exploration data.
E&P applications have evolved with the deployment of more advanced sensors to provide a more
accurate view of the underlying geology. Survey technologies such as orthogonal WAZ
(wide-azimuth) reflection seismology use a multi-sensor array to build a high-resolution
subsurface 3D model covering tens of thousands of square kilometers, thousands of meters under
water. Full 3D acquisitions generate between eight to

20GB/s of sensor seismic data totaling 250TB to 1PB per square kilometer. This seismic data
consists of both extremely large data acquisition files and a very large number of smaller files
containing metadata. For targeted physical surveys, Individual 45-60 meter core samples are
scanned at the drill site for every cubic centimeter, producing hundreds of gigabytes of highly
detailed images. Exploration data processing and analytics requires low latency storage to
process these massive amounts of large unstructured files and datasets quickly, while high
bandwidth is required to render and display results. Even as storage demands differ, IT must
quickly adapt where they place data to meet changing requirements during the exploration,
interpretation, and analysis needed to make a production decision.

DataSphere can non-disruptively place data on the ideal storage for meeting application
requirements for each step of the E&P pipeline. For example, DataSphere can place transient
data, such as scratch and OS swap space, on NVMe flash in application servers, active
application data on performance NAS tiers, and less used data on capacity NAS or cloud tiers.
Admins can even create volume groups for data that must meet compliance standards. These
capabilities can turn multi-day E&P tasks into single-day tasks to greatly accelerate
productivity. See the Primary Data Data Migration brief for detailed information about how
DataSphere optimizes performance.

Figure 2 - DataSphere places data on the ideal storage to meet application requirements for each stage of the E&P pipeline, without application interruption.

E&P WORKLOADS

E&P applications support a wide variety of users, leveraging data from many different sources.
This generates diverse and random workloads that require high performance storage to handle. The
problem is that once data becomes idle, it becomes a source of waste in the datacenter. Efforts
to diligently move cold data off performance storage are becoming increasingly challenging as
the 24/7/365 operation of global companies gives IT shorter windows when data can be archived
without affecting applications. As a result, many companies simply buy enough capacity so data
won’t have to be moved over its lifetime. Not only is this costly and inefficient, but
eventually, even this capacity runs out, requiring a massive project to archive data, upgrade
storage, or both.

DataSphere provides comprehensive visibility into application workloads, resources, and usage
patterns to predictively determine the best place to provision data, what data might need to be
moved to protect service levels, and what data can be safely archived – all without impacting
running applications. This gives oil and gas companies the best of both worlds. Active data gets the
performance to maximize processing, while cold data is automatically archived to reduce costs and
ensure performance capacity is available for data that needs it.

KEEPING COSTS IN CHECK

As applications consume increasing volumes and varieties of data from oil prospecting to
production, it seems unrealistic that companies will be able to slow storage spending, yet
DataSphere enables just that. By aligning data to the right resource for business needs,
DataSphere reduces infrastructure needs, expands storage choice, and increases operational
efficiency to dramatically reduce O&G datacenter costs. These savings free overprovisioned
resources for an immediate ROI on existing investments and make more efficient use of future
purchases.

DataSphere delivers these savings through a number of unique capabilities, including:

A global namespace with the ability to keep cold data accessible from cloud storage

Reducing overprovisioning by moving cool data to Tier 2 storage

Improved utilization to reduce the cost of new storage

Agnostic architecture that expands storage choice

INTEGRATING ON PREMISE STORAGE WITH CLOUD OR OBJECT STORAGE

A key challenge faced by oil and gas companies is that while they would like to archive a lot of
data, it must be kept accessible in case it is required for new projects. DataSphere makes data
available to applications across all storage in its namespace, including the cloud. Not only can
DataSphere automatically move cold files to the cloud or on premises object storage, it can also
automatically retrieve the data to primary storage if applications need it. Better still,
DataSphere does this without requiring applications to be modified to use retrieved data. In
addition, DataSphere maintains access to data in the cloud as files. This means that companies
can restore just the file that is needed, minimizing cloud bandwidth charges. These features
make it easy for companies to add object or cloud storage as a native active archival tier. For
more in-depth details on this use case, see the Primary Data brief on Simple Cloud Adoption.

ACCELERATE EXPLORATION AND PRODUCTION WHILE CUTTING COSTS

DataSphere gives Oil and Gas leaders the ability to automate the placement and movement of data
across all storage, including the cloud. This makes it possible to accelerate the performance of
E&P applications, even as applications become more powerful and thus more demanding, and as user
and workload diversity increases. DataSphere also automates many core management tasks to free
IT resources to support other initiatives. DataSphere can free terabytes of capacity on existing
storage, while seamlessly integrating traditional storage with on premises object or public
cloud storage as an active archive. Whichever use case best meets your architecture and business
needs, DataSphere can help you achieve dramatic cost savings across E&P projects and overall
operations.